Happy Birthday Philip K. Dick

posted December 16th, 2015

“A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne’s theorem that ‘No man is an island,’ but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.”

— Philip K. Dick, from his essay “Man, Android, and Machine” (1976). (Image of Data and Spot from Star Trek Next Generation.)

“These creatures are among us, although morphologically they do not differ from us; we must not posit a difference of essence, but a difference of behavior.”
— Philip K. Dick, from his essay “Man, Android, and Machine” (1976). (Image of a hunter posing like a bigshot over a hippopotamus he just murdered.)

“The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order? Van Vogt influenced me so much because he made me appreciate a mysterious chaotic quality in the universe which is not to be feared.”
— Philip K. Dick on the writer A.E. Van Vogt, from his interview with Arthur Byron Cover in Vertex, Vol. 1, no. 6, February 1974. (Image of Captain Elliot Spencer from Hellraiser III.)

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes . He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.